First Rain Brings Death (Of UPS)

Last night, we had our first rain of the fall (well it's almost fall) and it was enough to cause brownouts. This proved fatal for the UPS in the wiring closet. Fortunately, the TimeCommander+, a couple routers & switches and the NSLU2, which were on the UPS, were spared. The NSLU2 doesn't power itself back on when power is restored so I just realized it's resting quietly in the wiring closet instead of serving up http://www.doghouselabs.com. That's now fixed and a temp UPS has been installed. I'm not having luck with power related gear lately.

Building the W800 Antenna

I decided it's time to get rid of the original whip antenna that came with my W800 and build this antenna. Acquiring the parts became a treasure hunt. I picked up the nuts, bolts, washers and crimp lugs at Home Depot then headed over to Radio Shack for the SO-239 parts. Turns out the F to SO-239 Adapter isn't a regularly stocked item around here. I could order it or go to a Shack 30 minutes away and get it. Instead, I left empty handed and headed over to Fry's. There I found the Chassis Mount UHF SO-239 Coax Connector for a mere $1.49 vs. $3.69 at the Shack, but they didn't have the F to SO-239 adapter. They did have a BNC Female to SO-239 adapter and I happened to have a spare BNC Male to F connector at home.



I had still one more stop as I couldn't find the 1/16" brass rod at Home Depot. I stopped by my local Orchard Supply Hardware and found 3 packs of 1/16" x 12" brass rods for $1.79. Good enough.



Finally, I was able to start the project. Instead of a hacksaw to cut the rods, I used diagonal pliers. I also crimped the lugs after I inserted the rods - then I soldered them. Other than that, I followed the directions in the write up. I've got it temporarily hanging in my office but plan to put it in the attic this weekend. The whip antenna is in the attic but it can't see a Hawkeye motion sensor I just put in the backyard. The new antenna, on the other side of the house, can pick it up sometimes, so it should be a lot better in the middle of the attic.

Update: I've hooked it up to the RFID reader via a coax splitter and I have not had any dropouts! The antenna is still sitting in my office.

CCTV Server Power Supply Croaked

My HA server's power supply died back in March and the CCTV server's power supply died yesterday. It wasn't even 2 years old (the supply started off in the kitchen PC which was sporadically used. It wasn't used 24x7 until the CCTV server was created less than a year ago. Very disappointing. I've installed my backup ATX power supply, which has an intake fan over the CPU. The old supply didn't and rarely turned on its fan. It was a very quiet server, with just a slow case fan running. You can see the CPU temp is dramatically lower with the backup supply. The D201GLY2 got pretty hot at times, but was within specs. Now I need to hunt for a new 80Plus power supply.

New Toy: Aviosys 9100A Video Server

As I upgrade cameras, I keep the old ones around just in case I find some use for them. The main cameras are connected to an Avermedia NV3000. The leftovers are connected to modulators so we can watch our dog on Slingbox. I decided to get an Aviosys 9100A to get those cameras web enabled. It was easy to install and I've got 2 cameras running right now. I've integrated it into our Floorplan GUI using the device's special URLs described here. It works well, but the camera switching is a tad slow.

XTB Update

I plugged in the XTB and plugged into it the TW523 from my TimeCommander+, and now I've got solid X10 to the dead zone in the family room. Something was completely killing the family room, but now all is good. I haven't noticed any odd things when there's UPB on the power lines. Thumbs up for a great product.

XTB On The Way

I finally decided on ordering an XTB to see if it can help with some X10 signal issues in our home. The family room, over time, has moved slowly off the X10 grid for some reason. Even after unplugging a bunch of things, I wasn't able to find anything causing the noise. I've moved some stuff over to UPB, but to me, the cost of UPB (outside of Fry's clearanced modules) is too much to replace all our X10. I don't think I need the XTB-IIR, as I have really good X10 performance everywhere else. Hopefully, the XTB will co-exist with UPB. We'll find out in a few days.

Remote Thin Client

I have been working on thin client #2 which will be deployed at our other home. One thing I wanted to get running on it was bluetooth so it can track our presence with BlueTracker. It was quite a pain to figure out since XP Embedded doesn't really support bluetooth so I had to copy drivers, DLL's, etc over from an XP system. In addition to the BT radio drivers, it also needed drivers for the BT enumerator, BT PAN and BT RFCOMM protocol. Finally, I also needed to copy over the file irprops.cpl, which the 32feet.NET BT library needs. Figuring that out wasn't easy as BlueTracker would fatal with this error:

EventType : clr20r3 P1 : BlueTracker.exe P2 : 1.0.0.0 P3 : 4994a8a1
P4 : inthehand.net.personal P5 : 2.3.0.0 P6 : 483fc5c5 P7 : 15d
P8 : 8 P9 : system.dllnotfoundexception

After some Googling, I found this reference that points to an attribute called DllImportAttribute. I opened up InTheHand.Net.Personal.dll in my trusty Emacs editor, searched for that string and found irprops.cpl. Once that was copied over, BlueTracker worked.

Now, I need to come up with a mechanism for getting BlueTracker status across the Internet to our home. Since xPL is UDP, I can't just tunnel it through an SSH connection.

Homebrew Network Controllable PT Webcam

I received my USB Missile Launchers from Woot the other day. I ziptied a webcam to the top of the launcher and then started looking at how to control it. Fortunately, I found some open source software called SharpLauncher. It's coded in C# using #SharpDevelop and opened without a problem in Visual Studio 2005. It didn't take long for me to hack the code to add xPL support to support panning, tilting and firing the missiles. It works great, but since I used the developmental version of code, there's lots of crashes using the GUI - but I don't need it using xPL.

Thin Client Deployed

After many trials and failures, I've got the T5700 running the way I want. The hardest part is installing what I wanted with only 256MB of flash disk while running 256MB RAM.

The first thing I needed to do was wipe the flash disk and reinstall XPe. I followed this guide here to do that, remove unneeded apps and get admin access.

Installing Perl was an adventure. I used the zip version (not MSI) of ActivePerl to install it. That way I could go step by step through the installer.bat file and figure out what broke. One problem I kept having was running out of RAM while the installer ran. I killed pretty much every unnecessary process I could even explorer.exe until I ran into an error that said "Can't open nul: No such file or directory." After some Googling, I found out the XPe install doesn't have a NULL driver. I stumbled onto this old post that seemed to address my issue, but like the poster, I couldn't get the registry script to run. Eventually, I figured out it was a permission problem. Once I got that squared away, I was able to get ActivePerl installed. I ran PPM to install the Win32::MultiMedia package, copied my gameport script over, ran it but it didn't work. It still couldn't see the gameport.

After trying a number of different things, including accessing winmm.dll from Perl, I was about to give up. Then I read this post that mentioned installing DirectX on the T5700. Turns out there was compact DirectX 9.0C install for the T5700. Read the install instructions, changed the TMP and TEMP environment variables and it installed perfectly. Fired up the script and it worked!

However, it didn't appear that the XPe supports DCOM, so I had to come up with a different way of getting the data back to the server. I went back to xPL, using the command line xPL sender and calling that from my Perl script whenever an input changed. Good enough.

Next I tried to install a webcam on it, but the Logitech drivers just didn't seem to work right. I have a QuickCam Express and a QuickCam Messenger and neither would come up. So I scrapped that until I can try some different cameras.

So finally it's deployed - my little digital input over IP project. It only has 3 contact closure inputs connected to the Super JoyBox 8 (which can have up to 16). Now, I can relax and figure out what other things I can monitor with it.

Waiting for Thin Client

My thin client is sitting on a FedEx truck somewhere out for delivery. As I spent more time looking into it, it appears that .NET will not fit onto the thin client. That scratches my new gameport app as it was built with .NET and the xPL library is also .NET. I started looking at Perl and the Win32::MultiMedia::Joystick package. I wrote some code last night to test it out and it can do what I want. The only problem will be Perl fitting on the internal flash disk. Hopefully, I'll be able to install it and other apps on a USB flash disk.

The next part will be making the Perl script connect to the network. Rather than use xPL, I'm going to try to use DCOM to connect directly to starCOMUltra. I've got the Perl side figured out. I just need to get the thin client and see if DCOM will work on it.

I should add that there's always the possibility of getting a bigger internal flash drive, but I want to make do with what I have lying around.

HA Server Power Supply Problem

It appears my Antec EarthWatts power supply is failing. It took a few days to diagnose the problem as the server as having some random reboots and then problems coming back up after the reboot. There was nothing in the event log, so I swapped out some drive cables and hard drives thinking it was a drive issue. It seemed stable for a day or two but then I got another random reboot. I took the power supply out of my kid's PC and the server's been up & running since Tuesday. I've got a couple 250W 80Plus power supplies coming this week (one for the HA server and one for the DVR) so my kid can have his PC back.

DVR Server Update

The E5200 based DVR server is looking really good. With the 2 hard drives, it idles around 50 watts and gets up to about 90 watts playing a 1080i HD stream in SageTV through the onboard graphics. During playback, it used about 30% of 1 CPU. That means there's plenty of horsepower for it to do much more. I'm planning on moving SqueezeCenter and MediaNet over to it, but neither of those is CPU intensive. I need to see what other functions I can move over from the HA server. The cheap AirLink gig NIC works great. I was able to sustain 400 Mbps transfers between the DVR & HA server.

Update: I just purchased my SageTV license and 2 HD Theaters.

Slowly Piecing Together a Bargain DVR System

I just picked up an E5200 bundle from Fry's for $99. The E5200 is a 45nm processor that has low power consumption and pretty good horsepower compared to the Core2 E7300 (See review here). This goes nicely with the $85 1.5TB Seagate Drive I scored last month, the 2GB of of memory for $7 and the $3 Airlink gigabit NIC. I have a $19 MicroATX case, a spare $19 Seagate 200GB IDE drive for the boot drive (Staples Black Friday deal several years ago), and a spare $6 Antec 120mm Tricool fan. It will be running a free copy of Server 2003 courtesy of Microsoft DreamSpark and my wife who's taking a night class which qualifies her to get some free MS software. I just need an 80Plus power supply. I have a regular spare that I can use to get the system set up, but for the long-term, I'm going to find an high-efficiency power supply for this. Total cost so far is about $250 with the power supply left to buy.

Don't Forget to Vacuum Out Your Servers

This weekend, I powered down my HA server to install a new disk and do my periodic server vacuuming. I have two 120mm fans in the case to keep things cool, so it pulls in a ton of dust that ends up resting on drives, cards and in the CPU heat sink. The CPU heat sink was especially caked and I had to blow it out using a can of compressed air. The clean heat sink makes a huge difference in the CPU temps - about a 10 degree difference as you can see in the graph below:

AMEX Wishlist Goodies

I scored a few goodies from the AMEX wishlist promotion that was running. One of them was a $150 statement credit for a purchase from BestBuy. That went to buying a new HDTV. I also got a 25% off Amazon coupon - apparently it's good until 1/15/09 and can be used until the maximum discount is reached. Among things I got is the Antenna Direct DB4 antenna. It works great indoors bringing in HD signals that are over 40 miles from our house. I am contemplating other purchases to take advantage of this - possibly the HDHomerun and some Sage stuff (software & extender). Finally, a friend of mine snagged the Squeezebox Boom for me. It's very cool.

Current Sensing the DVD Player

I grabbed several split core current sensors off eBay and have been gradually deploying them. This week, I added current sensors to the family room TV, amp and DVD player. Now, when the DVD player is turned on, the system checks if the TV is on. If it isn't, it sends IR to turn it on. Then, it turns the TV volume all the way down since audio will be piped through the amp. Next, it checks if the amp is on and powers that up if it needs to and sets its input to DVD.

Update: I have taken all these current sensors off their DS10A's and ran Cat-5 to the gameport controller I use as a contact closure device.

Current Sensing the Dryer

I got a few of the current sensors mentioned in this thread to monitor if certain devices are powered on. The first one I used on the dryer. I opened up the small access panel where the plug is terminated (as mentioned here), disconnected a leg, peeled it apart from the rest of the power cable and inserted it through the current sensor. I turned on the dryer to test it out (it was on the 'air dry' setting), but the sensor didn't activate because the heater wasn't on. If I switched it to a heated cycle, the sensor triggered. So I had to move the current sensor to the other leg, which is active whenever the dryer is on. After putting everything back together, I attached the sensor output to a DS10A so that it can send the dryer's power status wirelessly. Now, whenever the dryer turns on, the laundry room exhaust fan turns on and when the dryer is done, the laundry fan turns off 2 minutes later.

Camera Server Efficiencies

Our CCTV system has been hacked and pieced together over the last 10 years and became more convoluted than necessary. Now that the Avermedia setup is running, I've been able to simplify things quite a bit. Our system previously used an IR controllable 4-1 composite video switcher to select an active camera based on user input or motion sensors. The automation server would use this feed to take snapshots of the activity. Each camera was also modulated so we could view them on our TVs or Slingbox. Now, the Avermedia records all 4 cameras based on its software motion detection. Also, the software is running full screen as a quad viewer. Since the server is headless, I've connected a VGA to composite video converter and modulated that output. This allows me to remove 3 modulators and the video switcher while still allowing the automation server access to all 4 cameras (albeit smaller views). Finally, an old series 1 TiVo was recording the camera feed continuously and that too got turned off along with its modulator.

Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS

I bought a few things off of eBay of late, taking advantage of the 30% cashback from live.com. One of those things is Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS. It's a very simple NAS device that takes an IDE drive up to 1TB and has both a 100 Mbps ethernet connection and USB 2.0. Performance is not great - it looks like it sinks about 15-20 Mbps, but that's OK for my needs. Another annoyance is it uses FAT32 so file sizes are limited to 4GB. On the plus side it's fanless and quiet, relying on its aluminum casing to dissipate heat. Unlike a lot of cheap NAS cases, this one features a configurable idle period before the hard drive is powered down. For me, this is a key as the NAS is just for weekly backups run in the middle of the night. I suppose I could put it on an appliance module and power it on and off when I need it. I'll measure its power consumption later today.

Update: It uses 4 watts with the drive powered down and 11 watts with it active.

D201GLY2 Camera Server Testing

I received the Avermedia NV3000 Monday and I've had some cycles to play around with it. I've only hooked up one camera so far, but I've got it set up for motion detection and remote access. It works well so far, but I can't stand that it requires IE to view its web interface. Stupid ActiveX components. With the 1 camera running, I'm using about 26% of the CPU and it's getting quite hot - about 66°C, but from what I've read, that's typically how hot they run under load. I was hoping to get away with minimal cooling but it appears I'll have to add another fan to the case. There's already a 120mm Antec Tricool in the rear of the case. I'm looking at adding an 80mm on the side panel to exhaust directly over the CPU. Hopefully, by this weekend I'll have 2 more cameras online.

The NSLU2 and CM11A have been deployed at our other house. The Airlink IP cam is also there. I've been monitoring the system and everything is working fine. I'll need to do some tweaking to the lighting schedule in the future and add a few more lights to the system at some point.